“Charles loved her voice. It was so soft and blurred, like pastels. It made his neck tingle just to listen to her. It gave him the same delicious feeling he had as he hovered on the brink of sleep and this feeling - until now - had been the single most pleasant feeling in his life. It was the voice that coloured everything he now thought about her. It was shy and tentative and musical. Sometimes he did not manage to hear the words she said, but he did not let on about his deafness.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“My name is Herbert Badgery. I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old and something of a celebrity. They come and look at me and wonder how I do it. There are weeks when I wonder the same, whole stretches of terrible time. It is hard to believe you can feel so bad and still not die.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“She did not begin to tell real lies until Rosa was in hospital suffering that filthy rot that left her all eaten out inside, as light and fragile as a pine log infested with white ant”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“She felt his personality to be round and smooth and free from nasty spikes.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“His great carved wooden head was marked with a black eye that was more yellow than black and from this spectacular bed of bruised flesh the eye itself, sand irritated, bloodshot, as wild as a currawong's, stared out at a landscape in which the tops of fences protruded from windswept sand.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“The cicadas, as if they were wired on the same circuit, suddenly filled the garden with a loud burst of celebration.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“It made me comfortable. It was a house where you could put your feet up and drink French champagne or Ballarat Bitter according to your mood.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“Years later when she was being eccentric, had shed her corset and let her arse spread unhindered by anything but her perpetual dressing gown.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“The most puzzling thing in the entire encounter occurred at a certain stage very late in the conversation, when she discovered she had been talking to a man. She had the feeling of a dream where things and people transmogrify, characters dissolve from one to the other like tricks in a film, monsters in a bottle. She had the sense, the very distinct sense, of her companion's female gender; she had been pleased to find it, had relaxed into it, had been even more delighted to find it coupled with an elegant wit and a sense of both joy and irony. The forces of life, she thought to herself, are flying high tonight.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“There are problems with the wombat," Nathan Schick said. "I was interested in wombats in '29. I went up to your zoo in Sydney and looked at the wombat. The fellow said you could train them but God, Herbie, no offence... Lee-Anne... but the wombat is not star quality.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“Damn it, why couldn't I have a photographic memory!"
"Thank God you don't," Caleb exclaimed in a disgusted tone.
"What makes you say that?" Reuben demanded hotly.
"Because then she'd be calling you Ruby, and I'd have to be sick to my stomach.”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Collectors
“The parallels between preserving food and preserving mummies were apparently not lost on posterity. In the nineteenth century, when mummies from Saqqara and Thebes were taken from tombs and brought to Cairo, they were taxed as salted fish before being permitted entry to the city.”
― Mark Kurlansky, quote from Salt: A World History
“Being in a relationship doesn’t mean that you never get aroused by anything else ever again. It just means that you don’t act on it. I think it’s healthy to maintain the ability to be aroused in other situations. Relationships shouldn’t be a prison.
You’d have gotten hard before, and you should now. As long as you know that the only person you’re going to be sliding your big hard cock in to, we’re fine. There really is a happy medium between the craziness of your parents with their compulsion to continue having sex with anyone they wanted, and couples who expect one another to be perfect at all times with the idea that no feelings of sexuality outside of the relationship are acceptable. Both of those types of relationships would never work for me. What’s perfect for me is that we stay ourselves, and make each other truly happy”
― Ella Fox, quote from Broken Hart
“Real love’s beautiful, elusive, and mean as a snake.”
― J.D. Robb, quote from Celebrity in Death
“And then I would cry, because even though boys don’t cry, I did.”
― Peter Monn, quote from The Before Now and After Then
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.